AALBC.com’s Look Has Changed Quite a Bit Since 1997

This was the start of the first African American Literature Book Club homepage. This was before the AALBC.com domain was even registered.

The original website address was http://johnsonpcc.com/books (where Johnsonpcc = Johnson P.C. Consultants). Johnson P.C. Consultants was a sideline business I ran building websites for other businesses. However, once I discovered the world of Black literature, I abandoned building websites for others to focus on what would ultimately become AALBC.com.

The AALBC.com domain was registered in March of 1998. Here I’ve spruced up the site with some navigation buttons and I took the dramatic step of actually placing the cover of a book on the homepage 🙂 (E. Lynn Harris’ And This Too Shall Pass).

Notice the BlackWords "Fist with the Pencil" Logo; AALBC was the "Official Web Site" for BlackWord's 360° A Revolution of Black Poets historic event. Poets are still raving about that event to this day.

AALBC boasted over 400 pages of content.

I liked the idea of having books on the homepage so I added nine more. At the time most people were still using 28.8 kbps modems; having this many books on the homepage increased the page download time dramatically.

These titles were chosen for the homepage because they were the books with the most votes for the Best Books of the 20th Century. The Color Purple by Alice Walker was Voted #1.

I also boasted over 500 pages of content.

I decided to ditch the book covers and add fancier buttons—that was not such a good idea.

By the way, that is Kindred by Octavia Butler on the homepage. A darn good book. Read it when you get a chance.

In the early days of this website, this rotating GIF of depicting a few of AALBC’s 50 Favorite Authors—created in 1998—was considered cool. While no longer useful, it remains a piece of AALBC history I find difficult to discard 😊

This time I lost the buttons, but continue to struggle for a decent look. This homepage may have lasted a couple of weeks.

Now I’m up to over 600 pages of content.

I’m still experimenting with the look and replaced the buttons with a drop-down menu. Advertising banners are introduced onto the homepage. Advertising eventually becomes AALBC.com’s largest revenue stream.

After witnessing my struggle with the homepage’s layout, Ron Kavanaugh hooked us up with a new design.

Notice the ad banner for the 1st Harlem Book Fair, July 24, 1999. The Harlem Book Fair ultimately becomes the premier Black Book fair in the country. I served on the Harlem Book Fair advisory committee for several years.

I’m still not satisfied with the website’s homepage. The drop-down menu caused problems with some browsers. Instead of buttons I went with text (often simpler is better).

The site is now boasting more than 700 pages. At the time, this was a huge website. All of the pages are linked in such a way that one may go from any page on the site to any other page in 4 clicks or less (the same is true today — even with thousands of pages).

I designed a logo (finally) and continued to experiment with the layout with mixed results.

I begin stocking and selling more books directly. Kevin Powell’s Step into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature is a big seller as well as titles from John A. Williams (holding inventory and directly shipping books does not turn out to be a viable long term strategy for me).

I now have over 1,200 pages of content. Around this time I stop counting pages.

This look lasted a couple of years. I added more books to the homepage and provided direct links to my most recently added content.

As you can see, AALBC.com’s homepage is in a constant state of change during the early 2000s. As I learn more and adapt to improvements in technology, you’ll see changes not only on the homepage but throughout the site.

Ron Kavanaugh of Mosaic Magazine redesigned AALBC’s logo which was a big improvement over my original.

This version of the AALBC.com website lasted 6 years. It was the first version of all the previous versions that I was satisfied with in terms of features, functionality, and design. While I was still not pleased with the homepage, the rest of the website was pretty solid (IMHO).

It was also during this period, 2008, when AALBC.com moved from being a sideline business to a full-time passion.

I also sported our newest logo. Ron Kavanaugh of Mosaic Literary Magazine stylized the logo he previously designed.

This is the 4th and most substantial upgrade to the AALBC.com website. I began migrating all of my content from static to web pages dynamically generated from a custom designed database.

The articles, author information, book reviews, video, commentary and related information we’ve collected over the past 18 years can now be presented in a wide variety of ways to help you discover your next great read. The site is now optimized for mobile devices, print, and of course desktop computers.

This upgrade’s goal was to modernize AALBC.com’s look and further improve the site’s presentation on handheld devices. I took inspiration for this design (menus and ad placement) from my WordPress Blog, which I stopped updating in 2020. s Some felt the entire website should have been designed with WordPress. Maybe I should have, but I didn’t.

This version of the AALBC.com website lasted the longest, almost 8 years.

During the last week of 2025, I gave the code for my website’s homepage to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini and asked each to modernize the page. Gemini’s result floored me! With the assistance of AI, I have made massive improvements to the AALBC website design at an incredible pace. My efficiency has increased by two orders of magnitude.

While I am pleased with the site’s progress, I cannot help but be concerned about the future of the World Wide Web, given the capabilities of AI today (January 2026). The web has changed so much since I started this site in 1997. The real challenge, however, will not be how this one site looks, but how we ensure Black stories and history continue to be told.